Early versions of classic Mac OS didn’t offer a lot of choice in terms of settings, and those that did were often implemented in their own tools as printers and networking were in the Chooser. Separate Control Panels came of age with System 7 in 1991, where they became applets accessible from Apple Menu Options. Originally, most were implemented as cdev code resources, but by the time of Mac OS 9 many had become full-blown apps.

Mac OS 9: Control Panels

The Energy Saver control panel offered three separate settings for sleep, each with its own slider: for putting your whole Mac to sleep, including its CPU, and optional separate controls for the display and hard disk(s).

In those days, virtual memory was controlled by the user in the Memory control panel, and RAM disks were popular among those Macs with ample physical memory.

Internet access and app settings were largely configured in a dedicated control panel, among the more complex in classic Mac OS. Details entered here, particularly for incoming and outgoing mail, applied to all compliant apps.

Mac OS X 10.0: System Prefs

By the end of classic Mac OS, there were 32 control panels, from the original Apple Menu Options to Web Sharing. Reproviding similar support in the first version of Mac OS X came in System Prefs, before its name was expanded to System Preferences a little later. These stepped away from being apps, and became the modernised equivalent of cdevs, using the NSPreferencePane API from Mac OS X 10.1 in 2001, and are assembled into bundles. Those have survived to the present, through System Preferences to the current System Settings.

Unlike control panels, System Prefs constrained all its panes to a fixed size, leading to deep and labyrinthine interfaces.

The QuickTime preference pane from 2002 illustrates how complicated these became.

In 2001, the Network pane was still used to configure AppleTalk, as supported by Apple’s own printers, the last of which had been discontinued in 1999. This also shows how individual panes had to cross-reference others, making navigation messy.

Individual views often contained remarkably few settings, here just five popup menus.

Mac OS X: System Preferences

At some time after 2002, System Prefs was expanded in name to System Preferences in a redesign, although its panes remained fixed in size.

QuickTime’s pane changed remarkably little in Mac OS X 10.3 Panther (2003).

In Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger (2005), the customisable favourites bar at the top was replaced by a navigation bar with search. Accessibility had been introduced as Universal Access, and in Mac OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion of 2012 it was revamped under its current name. The following screenshots show examples from around OS X 10.11 El Capitan in 2015.

The most visually impressive of all these panes was that for the Trackpad, containing embedded video clips demonstrating each gesture. These came at a cost, though: the pane was almost 100 MB in size as a result.

Bucking the trend to increasingly complex detail, Energy Saver in El Capitan was stripped down from its three separate sliders of Mac OS 9.

At its peak in macOS 12 Monterey in 2021-22, System Preferences provided around 30 panes arranged in what was intended to be logical order. Only after extensive use did many know where each was located. As some like Touch ID were model-specific, even experienced users sometimes took several seconds to locate the pane they wanted. Some, like Security & Privacy, had long outgrown the limitations imposed by their tiny windows.

macOS 13: System Settings

Apple’s radical redesign in macOS 13 Ventura of 2022 shocked many. Although it finally brought resizing to the System Settings window, that was confined to the vertical direction, resulting in many panes becoming long lists arranged in no obvious order. Given that almost all displays are wider than they are tall, that appeared an odd decision. Moreover, although it’s thought that SwiftUI was used to implement System Settings, little use has been made of its rich and extensible controls.

This is System Settings’ entry view in macOS Sequoia of 2025. Although its search feature has been improved, locating the appropriate section without using that remains a challenge for most.

Extensive use is made of floating modal windows, which in some settings can be nested so deep that reversing out of them is disorientating.

The greatest sin of all was that the wonderful video clips used previously in the Trackpad item had been dropped completely, and replaced by unhelpful static designs. After mass protests, Apple recanted and added animations, as shown above, but they were a pale shadow of System Preferences.

For all its shortcomings, and the limitations of fixed window size, System Preferences is one feature that many would like to see reinstated. Maybe the next redesign will be better conceived and received.